I was paid $.50 per delivery plus tips, when there were any, which was about half the time, and often from those who had the least money. I learned something nearly every time I worked—just by getting inside the doors of apartments I would not have otherwise. And the work wasn’t hard. The metal ice-box above the front wheel could hold as many as five deliveries if they weren’t too large. But sometimes, the box could barely hold everything a single family ordered. Then the two bags full of whole chickens, a couple of “stock bones,” ribs, roasts and things the butcher referred to mysteriously as “variety meats,” weighed more than was comfortable, especially if I had to walk up stairs in those buildings without elevators.

On one of my first deliveries, I went to Turner Towers, a large and somewhat famous apartment building across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. My father used to call it The Gilded Ghetto because he said mostly Jewish people lived there, as was true of Eastern Parkway as well. But the first person I met in Turner Towers was a black woman working for a couple my boss called “The Brits.” He wrinkled his nose as he said it.

I’d walked by Turner Towers many times, but I’d never been inside. There was a long, deep awning flanked by the two large wings of the building. A uniformed doorman instructed me to move the bike closer to the service entrance. This was 1964—bikes did not yet need to be locked, at least not outside Turner Towers. I rode up in the service elevator to the tenth floor. The door I entered opened right onto the kitchen, which was the only room of the apartment I saw. The black cook saw me peering over at the window behind her and smiled. I could see the top of the Brooklyn Museum and across the entire length of the Botanical Gardens. In a haze in the distance, I made out the Parachute Jump at Coney Island.

She wore a blindingly white, starched apron and a cap, perched towards the back of her head, that made me think of a nurse. She spoke with an Island accent.

“So you the new delivery boy?” she asked. “What happen to Tony?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that someone else had the job before me and this was the first I was hearing of Tony. I’m not generally shy, but I didn’t know how to answer her.

“I don’t know.” I stood dumbly holding the roast, afraid it was going to start dripping through the brown paper bag onto the terra cotta tiled floor.

She chuckled.

“You put that down here,” she said, pointing to a butcher-block table not much different than the one on which my boss hacked chops from a side of pork—I had never thought about where the chops I loved so much came from and it had never occurred to me to connect them with an actual pig, but while I couldn’t clearly picture just where on the pig the chops had been, there was no mistaking that the meat he was carefully cutting had once been an animal. I placed the package on a table just a bit smaller than his, but much neater and cleaner, almost new looking. His had a deep depression in the middle and the sides were stained with dark blotches. I often saw blood dripping down the side and into the sawdust. I was astonished that “the Brits” had such a professional looking table, but even more so at the size of their kitchen. I lived only a block away, around the corner on Lincoln Place. Our own kitchen was narrow and although we had an equally narrow dining room, we saved that for ceremonial meals on holidays or when we had company—most of the time we ate at the Formica and metal table right next to the stove. When all five of us were seated, someone would have to get up and step back into the living room if anyone needed to get to the bathroom. The kitchen in Turner Towers had a large black oven with six burners and an awning; hanging above the butcher-block table was an oval rack—saucepans and skillets in various sizes hung from large hooks. There were heavy looking pots stacked on shelves next to the oven. The glass-fronted cupboards were filled with more bowls and plates than I’d ever seen outside of a restaurant. The whole room was larger then our kitchen, dining room and living room combined. It was nearly as large as our entire apartment.

As the cook unwrapped the paper to inspect the delivery, her employer entered through a swinging door. She was a thin, sharp-featured woman with shiny brown hair that framed her face and was held in place by a barrett.

“Let me see that roast,” she said to the cook, glancing angrily at me. I was surprised that her accent wasn’t stronger. She didn’t sound as British as I’d expected.

“It’s fine,” the cook reassured her. “Is good meat.”

She wanted me to tell my boss that she was “Bloody angry!” at the quality of the meat he sent her the last time. I’d just begun working for him and knew nothing about it. But I didn’t say that. I was already speechless at the way she was wagging her finger at me and making sure I knew exactly what I was supposed to go back and tell my boss.

“And,” she said turning to the cook, “there will be no tips until the meat improves.”

The cook smiled at me the whole time the woman was berating my boss, I think to keep me from freaking out. I had never before been spoken to like that by anyone who was not a teacher, a relative or a close enough friend of my parents to know that they could get away with scolding me and my parents would side with them, not me. I left without saying a word to her, only nodding when she asked if I understood.

My boss laughed when I repeated what I’d been ordered to tell him. He didn’t explain or criticize her, just said “So that’s what took you so long!” and sent me out on my next delivery. Later, at dinner at our Formica table, my father was indignant on my behalf, but my mother enjoyed the story and wanted details about the kitchen. She was disappointed that I hadn’t gotten to see the rest of the apartment. But her real pleasure was in explaining to me the implications of “bloody.”

“Oh, that means she was really angry. They don’t say ‘bloody’ unless they’re furious. It’s the same as us saying . . . well, it’s like a curse word to them. Don’t ever say that to a British person.” There was an English secretary at the law firm she worked for and my mother said she’d never heard the woman use the word. The worst thing my mother ever said was “sonsabitches” and she seemed awkward about it. My father was a bit of a prude and could hardly bring himself to say ‘fart’ in front of us children.

I didn’t need to be told what the American equivalent was. Before the end of my first day at the butcher’s, I’d heard him screaming about the “fucking cocksucker” whose car was in the spot where he usually parked the store truck. It wasn’t the first time I heard those words, but the intonation was different, unselfconscious and genuinely angry. I was thrilled to have a new model for how to curse to my friends. I looked forward to dropping in a few “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers” when I complained about the brothers or the nuns at school and started mentally rehearsing. It was important to get it right. Nothing would be more humiliating than saying, “Sister Agatha, man! What a motherfucker! Know what she did to my sister?” and having my friends stare silently at me, unsure of how to respond. Cursing with assurance, with authority, was a test I was determined to pass. I knew it would sound best if I could do it with a cigarette dangling from my mouth, wincing against the smoke rising into my eyes, the very image of the “surly teenager” my mother always complained about. But I was determined that I would not smoke.

Steve Turtell is a poet who lives in New York City. His first book, Heroes and Householders was published in 2009 by Orchard House Press. His 2001 chapbook, Letter to Frank O'Hara is the 2010 winner of the Rebound Chapbook Prize given by Seven Kitchens Press and will be reissued with an introduction by Joan Larkin in 2011. He is currently at work on Peter Hujar: A Portrait in Life and Death, a memoir of his friendship with the photographer Peter Hujar.

So I was moving and nothing was going to stop me—not the landlady’s attempt at shaming me: “Steve, why you do this!?” I’m sure that was a big motivator for her but it didn’t mean shit to me. And I didn’t care that I was breaking the law (I was wasn’t I? Isn’t it illegal not to pay your rent? Can someone tell me? Besides this was the tail end of hippiedom and breaking the law was something that felt like a moral obligation to me—I was only holding up my end of the bohemian bargain.) Twice already the landlady had called the owner and he had come down from his Park Avenue South office to bang on my door demanding his rent. I was not ten yards away hiding under the bed both times and was amazed he gave up so easily after a few minutes. It only encouraged me.

I’d wanted this apartment on Elizabeth Street for three years already—the entire time I lived on 10th Street. My friend Raymond (he now calls himself Ramon but that too is another story) lived on the ground floor and had the storefront and basement. He was then a potter and is now a ceramic artist (another story) and we had worked together next door at what is now the Parisi Brothers Bakery back when it was by day Good Mother Earth and by night Paradox Bakery, the only macrobiotic bakery in New York City. We worked for Paradox in 1971 and became friends. I would see him riding his bike in my nabe and one day he said there was an apartment in his building that might become vacant and was I interested. He said the rent was $55. If it was only the windowsill that was for rent I would have been interested. But it was better than that. He said it had four rooms and high ceilings and the current tenant was an absentee who didn’t pay the rent on time. That was the one thing the owners didn’t like. They didn’t care about anything else and God knows there was no upkeep. But once a month you had to go to the Palace Hotel above CBGB’s (which wasn’t CBGB’s yet but that’s another story) and give $55 in cash to a frog-throated guy named Frankie and go back to your apartment having done your duty by the owners. The absentee tenant was a strange guy whom I never met and whose name I don’t remember. He was a carpenter and lived most of the time in an SRO on Broadway below Houston (when Broadway still had SRO’s and Bloomingdale’s hadn’t even heard of LoBro--yes another story) and was not much of a domestic type in spite of the “improvements” he made. I saw them when Raymond showed me the apartment after the landlord finally told him that he was no longer a tenant. There was nothing like a lease so there was nothing to argue about anywhere, especially not in court. Once he had removed his belongings and was forbidden access to the apartment I was let in to see it!

292 is on the north side of Houston just a few doors up the street. The apartment was on the third floor, two flights up—an old, un-renovated cold-water flat, it had a small hallway that led into a kitchen with a bathtub hidden behind a wooden partition (one of the improvements) right next to the tenement sized stove and a big window facing the loft building behind us on Bowery. A half-size refrigerator sat on a cardtable. If I stood right at the window and looked up I could see the sky above the roof line opposite me but even still there was a decent amount of light. Off the hallway was a square living room with a vaguely art deco gas heater exhausting into a fake marble fireplace—the marble was standard issue, urinal grey. But maybe only men old enough to remember NYC subway toilets will know what I’m talking about.

The living room had two windows with identical views to the one in the kitchen, and two smaller rooms on its opposite side: a small square room that could be a bedroom or a dining room and a longer one that I envisioned as a grand study/workroom. Other than the front door, featuring four panels of frosted glass, the only door was the one that gave some privacy to the water-closet, off the tiny hall just inside the apartment. Even the transoms had been knocked out in all the others. There was grey industrial carpet on the living room floor. The apartment was filthy and I would eventually fill two dumpsters with stuff that the carpenter hadn’t removed. I loved it. I wanted it immediately and I could have it as of October 1st.

Charlie and I had to rent a U-Haul to bring my stuff (mostly books and records and cooking equipment) over. I had moved into 242 E. 10th Street three years before in the summer, when I was living and working on Fire Island and all I possessed could be carried in a couple of shopping bags and a few boxes. Now I had a 12 foot van packed to the top. Still it didn’t take much time. I wasn’t going to un-pack right away. The only furniture I had was a mattress, a table, a desk and some chairs and there was plenty of room for the boxes in the long back room. I put my mattress on the floor and hung my clothes in the low-rent California closet the carpenter had built over the door connecting my apartment to the adjoining one on the same floor. They were mirror images of each other. My floor mate was a pleasant, friendly widow, Mrs. DiPerri, whose mother and father still lived one floor down, in the apartment directly below hers. Her short room abutted my long room and vice versa.

We could hear each other easily and there were many nights I overheard her sobbing into the telephone, complaining of her loneliness and explaining patiently that she needed to cry, it made it possible for her to go on. But every morning she would open her door at 7 am. Even though she had a phone, and her parents had a phone, she would shout down the stairwell “Maaa!! Maaa--aaaa!!” and in a few minutes Mrs. Millazo would open her door and shout back and the day would begin. I was already sitting at my desk writing by this time, having consumed one half of the quart of black espresso I drank every morning. I wasn’t due in at the bakery until 10 am and I liked to give myself the best energy of the day. This went on for ten years until her parents died and Mrs. DiPerri moved out to live with other family. By then the neighborhood had begun to change and the next tenants were more like me: a painter named Laura Demme would live with the percussionist David Van Tiegham directly below me for almost a decade. By then Raymond became Ramon and he’d been showing his art at OK Harris in SoHo for years. I stopped being a baker and started having to wear a suit and tie to work.

But that’s another story. In the meantime I was happy. I had an apartment twice the size of my previous one. I could walk to work, which then was a long-gone bakery/catering business called Montana Palace on E.9th Street. The rent was beyond cheap. My fancier friends (a couple of them fashion industry snobs who couldn’t imagine not having a doorman or a “good address.” When they sneered I reminded them of my rent. I figured, no matter how poor I was I could always come up with $55. I figured wrong, but it was going to take another 8 years and getting sober for me to figure out why (another story).

Steve Turtell is a poet. He has been Director of Public Programs at the Museum of the City of New York, The South Street Seaport Museum and the New-York Historical Society. He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. His first book, Heroes and Householders, will be published this year by Windstorm Creative Press. He is currently working on Home Address, from which this is taken, a memoir of the 16 different places he lived in before moving to 292 Elizabeth Street.